Parasitic capacitances associated with overhangs of the T-shape-gate enhancement-mode (E-mode) GaN-based power device, were investigated by frequency/voltage-dependent capacitance–voltage and inductive-load switching measurements. The overhang capacitances induce a pinch-off voltage distinguished from that of the E-mode channel capacitance in the gate capacitance and the gate–drain capacitance characteristic curves. Frequency- and voltage-dependent tests confirm the instability caused by the trapping of interface/bulk states in the LPCVD-SiN_x passivation dielectric. Circuit-level double pulse measurement also reveals its impact on switching transition for power switching applications.

To reduce the atmospheric turbulence-induced power loss, an AlexNet-based convolutional neural network (CNN) for wavefront aberration compensation is experimentally investigated for free-space optical (FSO) communication systems with standard single mode fiber-pigtailed photodiodes. The wavefront aberration is statistically constructed to mimic the received light beams with the Zernike mode-based theory for the Kolmogorov turbulence. By analyzing impacts of CNN structures, quantization resolution/noise, and mode count on the power penalty, the AlexNet-based CNN with 8 bit resolution is identified for experimental study. Experimental results indicate that the average power penalty decreases to 1.8 dB from 12.4 dB in the strong turbulence.

The received signal intensity fluctuation and communication performance of an underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) system under the air bubble effects are experimentally investigated. For different bubble density and size, lognormal, gamma, Weibull, and generalized extreme value distributions are tested to fit the fluctuation of the signal intensity at the receiving end. The best fitting distribution is found to vary with bubble parameters. The communication system performance with on–off keying and pulse position modulation is further studied.

We extend the transmission range of non-line-of-sight ultraviolet communication to 500 m in a real-time system experiment using a 200 mW solid-state 266 nm laser, where the data rate can reach 400 kbps at a frame error rate lower than 10 5 in the real-time system test. The results can beat the best record so far, in terms of both the data rate and transmission distance.

In underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC), a channel is characterized by abundant scattering/absorption effects and optical turbulence. Most previous studies on UOWC have been limited to scattering/absorption effects. However, experiments in the literature indicate that underwater optical turbulence (UOT) can cause severe degradation of UOWC performance. In this paper, we characterize an UOWC channel with both scattering/absorption and UOT taken into consideration, and a spatial diversity receiver scheme, say a single-input–multiple-output (SIMO) scheme, based on a light-emitting-diode (LED) source and multiple detectors is proposed to mitigate deep fading. The Monte Carlo based statistical simulation method is introduced to evaluate the bit-error-rate performance of the system. It is shown that spatial diversity can effectively reduce channel fading and remarkably extend communication range.

For nonline-of-sight ultraviolet communication links, a simple and concise parametric expression (PE) of channel path loss is valuable for link performance analysis in typical scenarios. It is observed that the light energy in the scattering volume can be approximated using a line integral. Combining curve fitting for the scattering phase function and the mean value theorem of integrals, we propose a simple but highly accurate PE. It matches well with the Monte Carlo simulations for typical LED-based communication with small beam divergence (<45°); when the beam divergence is smaller than 10°, their differences are less than 1 dB in most geometrical conditions. The proposed PE also shows good consistency with our outdoor experimental measurements, and the reported experimental results in the literature.